Abstract
The vehicle ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging network technology that is expected to be cost-effective and adaptable, making it ideal to provide network connection service to drivers and passengers on today's roads. In the next generation of VANETs with fifth-generation (5G) networks, software-defined networking (SDN) technology will play a very important role in network management. However, for infotainment applications, high latency in VANET communication imposes a great challenge for network management, whereas direct communication through the cellular networks brings high cost. In this paper, we present an optimizing strategy to balance the latency requirement and the cost on cellular networks, in which we encourage vehicles to send the SDN control requests through the cellular networks by rebating network bandwidth. Furthermore, we model the interaction of the controller and vehicles as a two-stage Stackelberg game and analyze the game equilibrium. From the experimental results, the optimal rebating strategy provides smaller latency than other control plane structures.
I. INTRODUCTION
Vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANET) will playing an important role to provide network connection service for drivers and passengers [1][2]. Meanwhile, fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will improve existing vehiclular communications in performance, user experience, etc.[3][4]. In the development of 5G networks and VANETs, software defined networking (SDN) technology which decouples the network management from the data transferring will be an important approach to the network structure [5][6]. Therefore, a software defined VANET with 5G networks will be a potential network architecture for the next generation VANETs [7].
VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we propose a scenario that uses hybrid mode for the southbound communication in the control plane of software defined VANET with 5G cellular networks. Since the ad-hoc connections bring higher latency than high performance cellular networks while cellular networks cost much more energy and budget than the ad-hoc network, we design a bandwidth rebating strategy to balance the cost and performance in the southbound communication. We formulate the bandwidth rebating problem as a two-stage leader-follower (Stackelberg) game, and analyze the game equilibrium. We also evaluate our hybrid mode with extensive simulations and compare its performance and cost with other southbound communication mode. From the result of performance evaluation, the hybrid southbound communication mode archives the balancing of the network cost and the network performance for the software defined VANET.
